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The town Charli lived in stole the name of New Orleans, yet it resided slightly off the city marker and a smudge away from the S on a map. The kids in East roamed around the streets bouncing basketballs and dancing along to the songs blasting from shiny cars with names that filled with letters that didn't make the sounds their teachers said they did. They had nothing better to do, Charli believed, cause they stayed outside all night laughing and smelling like grass.
The air in East carried the strong scent of gasoline all the way from New Orleans and kicked up the red soil that a few kids ate for fun. Charli loved the town; she hated the idea of sharing East with her family. She discovered the village, she called it, after the flawless dark man dropped her off on the side of the road and drove away — he took Charli's kisses and pride with him.
The hot wind whispered through Charli's coiled hair and picked up the ends of her tasseled dress as she sat on her front porch. It dried the sweat trickling down her neck and the backs of her thighs. Rosa Glen said the river down three blocks from her neighborhood trapped in the hot air like a bag in a vacuum, but the constant waves of heat blowing through the open doors in East told another story. Charli figured that without that river, East would be hotter than the Devil in a crowded church.
"I heard you got family coming down here," Duke showed off his open mouthed smile that made Charli wonder if he even knew how to close it.
Word traveled in East faster than hot wind, and Rosa Glen had a major part to do with it, but Duke dominated a bigger piece. Between his smiling and his talking, nobody ever saw the faux-mailman with his mouth shut. He had a lot of friends, mostly because he delivered people's mail and sat on their porches until the sun rose right back up in the sky.
The people in East were never given a mailman, they didn't even know who assigned mailmen. People just walked up to the post office, directly across the street from Charli's home, got their mail, and left right out until Duke took the role. The town didn't pay him with the little money they had, but people tipped the nosy man with desserts and family stories.
Charli gave him neither; she barely even liked the man. The magnetic air around him and the large white teeth that he loved to show reminded her too much of the dark man that dropped her in East in the first place. Her resentment towards the strange man festered in the darkness of her womb like a parasite until it was expunged from her life months later. The parasite suckled the resentment away from her and she watched as it metamorphosed into tangible sadness.
Duke handed her a envelope carrying, as usual, her bill, and sat beside her on the porch without waiting for an invitation.
Charli simply stared at the ink on the white paper in her hands and acted as though Duke turned around and continued down the street.
Her silence didn't ward him off, so he continued, "I ain't think you had any family at first, Ms. Charli. I thought you was a widow, then I thought you was lonely by choice, and then I thought you was a killer."
